The perennial problem of defining Peter Dutton

“I spoke to Peter Dutton and said, ‘We need to be out there selling you, and our colleagues need to be selling you’,” Jason Wood told ABC RN this morning, by way of explaining the Liberals’ truly ruinous loss in the Aston byelection. It is the first time a government has prised a seat away from the opposition in a byelection this side of 1920.

A little later, host Patricia Karvelas put that notion to former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, for whom the conversation presumably represented a chance to take a breath after roughly 36 straight hours of laughter at how things were turning out for the man whose failed putsch in 2018 cost him the top job.

Turnbull replied that, of course, Dutton was plastered all over Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. Just not on Liberal posters. If Woods wanted to take on the job of “defining” Dutton for the public, Turnbull said, he could “knock himself out” — an interesting choice of words, given he seemed to be implying his would be the act of someone suffering from head trauma.

So what options do the Liberals have? Crikey looks back on the attempts to “define” Dutton for the voting public.

2001-18: hard man

Dutton was elected, appropriately enough, in the 2001 election, when John Howard exploited national anxieties around refugees and Islamic terrorism to a victory that had appeared highly unlikely. Dutton soon became renowned and reviled. He was talked about as a potential “messiah” as early as 2009, by which stage he’d already earned the distinction of being the only opposition frontbencher to defy bipartisanship around the apology to the Stolen Generations, choosing to walk out of Parliament.

Over the next decade, particularly after taking on the immigration portfolio in 2014, Dutton would be, as Guy Rundle would later put it, “offered to the public [as] the man who had enough of the bastard in him to do what many people wanted to be done, but couldn’t acknowledge what was involved in it being done”. Indeed, we have to be fairly summary in listing the ways he earned the public’s attention in those days, but for a few examples:

• In 2015, he was caught on camera joking about rising sea levels affecting Pacific Island nations, saying their leaders are generally not all that punctual as time is meaningless when you have “water lapping at your door”.
• In 2016, he sent a catastrophic “text to the person the text was about”, having to apologise after informing no less than the political editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Samantha Maiden, that he thought she was “a mad fucking witch”.
• The same year he invoked a kind of “Schrodinger’s refugee”, completely dysfunctional in every basic skill but also better qualified for your job than you, saying: “They won’t be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English … These people would be taking Australian jobs, there’s no question about that”.

2018: first public smile

Then Dutton decided he wanted to be prime minister, and the work of negating everything he’d worked for over the past 17 years began. Initiating his challenge to Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, he fronted the press, dragging the corners of his mouth back towards his ears with all the strength he could muster, and promised to “smile” and “maybe show a different side” of himself.

The media, as ever, was more than happy to help, running long interviews and profiles of the ex-cop that underlined his softer side and “self-deprecating sense of humour”. That ability to poke fun at himself was sorely tested after the disastrous coup failed, leading to a photo that is able to either bring about or cure clinical depression depending on your politics.

2019: ‘He is not a monster’

In the lead-up to the 2019 election, Dutton’s seat was on a 1.7% margin, and many associated him with chaos or callousness. In one of the all-time great “wheel out the family” attempts to humanise a politician, Dutton’s wife Kirilly decided she needed to defend him. And the best she could summon for the benefit of Courier-Mail readers was: “He is not a monster.”

Dutton that year had done a lot to earn such praise, having implied his opponent, Labor’s Ali France, was using her disability as an “excuse” for not yet having moved to the electorate, and saying refugees who became pregnant as the result of rape on Nauru were “trying it on” by seeking abortions in Australia.

2022: Sorry about all that

The job of arguing that his public image for roughly 95% of his time in public life was just a misunderstanding really began once he became Liberal leader — again, aided by plenty of “family man” and “worthy of a chance” coverage, as well as Dutton’s reiterated contrition for walking out of the Stolen Generations apology.

But just as before, he seemed destined to revert to type — snapping that the asylum-seeking Murugappan family, temporarily free in Perth after years of detention at the hands of the state, were subject to “a situation that is of their own making, it is ridiculous, it is unfair on their children, and it sends a very bad message to other people who think they can rort the system as well”.

What kind of a man is Peter Dutton? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.